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Sunday 19 July 2009

This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, LL [Lawrence Lessig], KK [Kevin Kelly] and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it’s progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like “radical transparency” without living up to them. Some of those young people have created great things. Others have been suckered into digital sharecropping efforts believing that they are doing something worthwhile, painting a fence for some Tom Sawyer with a venture capitalist behind him who makes a mint off their efforts. And others have become those rich young men (almost always men) with their private jets. Whimsley

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